


Requiem

by cupcakeb



Category: Elite (TV)
Genre: ALL THE ANGST, Adopted Sibling Relationship, Angst, F/M, he liked rich girls just like YOU, nothing particularly explicit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:20:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25456072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cupcakeb/pseuds/cupcakeb
Summary: He’s a cautionary traditionalist with rage coursing through his veins; she’s all chaotic enigma waiting for someone smarter than Alan Turing himself to solve her.“Marina isn’t like you, honey,” his mom tells him at age thirteen, after a vicious sibling argument. “She needs you to look out for her.”That makes him angry. But everything does these days. He nods resolutely.
Relationships: Guzmán Nunier Osuna & Marina Nunier Osuna
Comments: 8
Kudos: 50





	Requiem

**Author's Note:**

> I have nothing to say for myself. These two have always given me weird vibes.

Marina is two inches shorter than him. They’re the same shade of pale in the winter, but she's always more tan in the summer. Where her eyes are blue like waves crashing to the shores, his mirror the green of a gloomy lake.  
  
They are the same, but not.  
  
Close, too close, never close enough.  
  
There are 152 days he spent on this planet without her, before she was born. He’s glad he doesn’t remember that time.  
  
He’s eleven when he finds out just how unlike her he really is. It is not flesh and blood that binds them, but circumstance; a creamy white piece of paper bearing the signatures of their ( _her_ ) parents.  
  
He’s a cautionary traditionalist with rage coursing through his veins; she’s all chaotic enigma waiting for someone smarter than Alan Turing himself to solve her.  
  
“Marina isn’t like you, honey,” his mom tells him at age thirteen, after a vicious sibling argument. “She needs you to look out for her.”  
  
That makes him angry. But everything does these days. He nods resolutely. 

Academically bright, but not very street smart — that’s Marina, too. Constantly letting curiosity get the better of her, being persuaded by boys several years her senior to join them at parties, to accompany them to bars she isn’t yet old enough to get into, to spend time at pool parties with them. Guzmán follows her wherever she goes. He looks out for her.  
  
He’s fourteen, and she’s about to be, but sometimes he swears he acts thirty-five around her.  
  
At the pool, her bikini is criminally tiny, and he grabs her arm roughly to drag her away, wraps a towel around her.  
  
“You’re thirteen,” he says, whispers it angrily. “Do you have any idea what these boys will say about you when they see you like this?”  
  
Marina never backs down from a fight. Never. Not with him. Her head held high, she gets impossibly closer, then raises a brow in challenge. “What are they gonna say?”  
  
His grasp on her arm gets tighter, and he can tell it’s painful by the way her jaw sets. But she’s unrelenting, just keeps up the icy stare.  
  
The towel still wrapped around her, he runs a hand from her shoulder to her neck, then down between her breasts, slipping under the string holding her flimsy excuse for a swimsuit together. “They’re gonna say you’re a whore.”  
  
She has the audacity to laugh. He’s towering over her, his hand still playing with the lycra of her top. The laugh is brutal and brimming with meaning; like she’s taunting him, pity echoing as the sound of laughter lingers in the air.  
  
Provocation works on her like a charm — he knows this, and yet never fails to provoke her all the same. Her calloused hands push against his chest roughly, and he can see the fiery anger in her eyes. He lit that flame, and despite everything else, that makes him proud.  
  
It’s obtusely fucked up.  
  
“Don’t be jealous,” she says, and there’s heat behind it. A threat, maybe, too. Or an invitation?  
  
_Be jealous. I dare you.  
  
_The towel around her shoulder drops, and she sways her hips as she walks off. The way she smiles at one of the upperclassmen, then sits down on his lounge chair and lets him put a hand on her thigh is nearly enough to make Guzmán throw a punch.  
  
No one gets to touch his baby sister like that. 

**  
  
It would be easier if he didn’t walk in on them. If he didn’t have to stand there, gobsmacked, frozen in place and watch this eighteen-year-old _man_ fuck his fourteen-year-old sister.  
  
The little moan she lets out when Pablo pulls on her hair is permanently etched into his brain. Surely there are more morally sound ways to go about this — he could interrupt and make a scene, or slam the door, or somehow alert them to his presence, but he doesn’t. Instead, he watches them for longer than he should, watches _her_ closely, before quietly closing the door behind him.  
  
It would be easier if he hadn’t seen any of this, because now he can’t unsee it.  
  
And when the rage fades, after he beats the kid up, after he tells their parents what’s going on, the vision of her like that stays with him.  
  
**

This is why he looks out for her.  
  
When he doesn’t, she does shit like this. She’s in just a bra and her jeans, sort of dancing, surrounded by people he’s sure are absolute strangers to her. Plainly offering herself up to these hordes of proletariat wannabe cool kids, like the jeans she’s wearing aren’t couture.  
  
It takes five angry, big strides across the room for him to get to her. He pushes disgustingly drunk teenagers out of the way and pulls her up by the arm. The look on her face tells him she knows better than to fight him. Slightly annoyed, but equally intrigued — that’s what he reads it as, anyway.  
  
The indifferent smile on her face is oh-so typical.  
  
She pulls her tank top back on, then follows him to whatever the fuck this room is — maybe a bedroom, maybe an office, he doesn’t know and he doesn’t care.  
  
“Do I need to remind you of what happened the last time we left you alone?” What he means to say is the last time _I_ left you alone, because she’s his responsibility.  
  
There’s no point in rehashing this. He doesn’t need to be reminded of what her irresponsible choices led to the last time.  
  
Yeah, he’s a fucking classist at heart. Born and bred. Or maybe just bred. “You don’t learn, and just keep hanging out with that kind of people.”  
  
Marina lets out a maniacal laugh, spits venom.  
  
“Pablo liked rich girls, just like you,” then she’s on her feet, moving closer to him, closer than she should be. Her hand is on his chest, grabbing onto the lapel of his shirt possessively. “Isn’t that right?”  
  
If he didn’t know what Marina looks like when she wants her words to hurt, he might miss it; he might think she was making a casual observation. But she chooses her words carefully, like a samurai choosing his sword for a fight. Her calculated blow lands, feels like she’s stabbed him right in the chest. The smirks that spreads across her lips is definitely intentional.  
  
And really, he doesn’t know how it happens, who leans in first. For all the goading prior, this kiss isn’t a competition. It’s not a fight. It’s a foregone conclusion.  
  
“We’re leaving,” he says when he can muster up the courage to pull away. It’s not up for debate. Marina nods solemnly and goes back to sporting that ridiculous smile — the kind that’s clearly meant to make the rest of the world think she’s indifferent to absolutely everything.  
  
For someone who cares so deeply about so many things, she sure cares about making sure others don’t notice. Appearances. She cares about them more than she’d like to admit, which is ironic if only because she keeps reminding him that he should care about those less.  
  
Hypocrisy at its finest is what he’d call the way she navigates a path through the crowds, the way she practically drags him out the front door of this small, depressing apartment filled with teenagers who will never amount to anything in life. Ah yes, there’s the classism again, kicking in. Marina would deny it if he asked, but he knows she’s thinking the same thing.  
  
They go for a swim, because that feels safer than going up to their rooms, and when she says, “Stop trying to save me,” he pulls her under with him, then kisses her again.  
  
He’s never gonna stop. That doesn’t mean he’ll succeed.  
  
**  
  
He’ll never forget the eerie gut feeling of instinctively knowing that something is wrong with her.  
  
But he can usually sense her in the room, can feel her energy, and now all he feels is dread  
  
The detective sees him, and he swears he sees a hint of pity on her face. “Where is my sister?” He must repeat it fifteen times, hears his voice getting more and more frazzled.  
  
That’s all he remembers. It must be sudden onset PTSD — is that a thing? — because he has no recollection of who tells him what happened, of how he gets home, and into bed, and to sleep.  
  
His mother is completely distraught when he sees her in the morning, after a night plagued by fitful sleep and nightmares he won’t be forgetting anytime soon.  
  
The look on her face is accusatory. Or maybe that’s on him, maybe that’s what he wants to see because he blames himself. He wasn’t watching out for Marina, he let her fuck up, he failed to protect her and now she’s dead.  
  
His mother looks alien, sitting on the sofa in sleepwear he’s seen her in a million times. All the fierce strength, the unrelenting energy he associates with her are gone, replaced by raw, unpolished pain.  
  
The hug he engulfs her in is drawn out; his entire body feels heavy, like it’s moving in slow motion. She sobs, and he wants to but can’t.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he says, and it sounds angry, because he isn’t sure sadness is an emotion he’s ever had to voice. “I should have been there with her.”  
  
_I should have died in her place_ is what he doesn’t say. But he definitely thinks it; knows it would be easier for his parents to stomach.  
  
Marina was the miracle; the child they’d been praying for for years, a dream they’d all but given up on when they signed his adoption papers. Her miraculous conception is indicative of her defiant nature; like she decided to come into this world only after tricking their parents into taking on an unwanted child like him. They _wanted_ her, then settled for him and kept him around for one purpose only — to look out for her. Even that he couldn’t do.  
  
Marina made him feel wanted. Now he just feels lost, with nothing left to live for.  
  
His mother hugs him closer, wets his shirt with the sobs wrecking through her body.  
  
“She was such a good girl,” she cries, and the cynic in him wants to disagree. Marina was many things, but she wasn’t good; wasn’t obedient or put together. He’s sure above all else, she would hate to be referred to as a good girl.  
  
No, Marina was chaos. Spontaneous, rebellious, vulnerable and yet somehow still guarded. Fake. She was fake in ways he doesn’t think she ever even knew were fake; flying the flag of impulsiveness high even when she was taking calculated risks.  
  
Marina wasn’t good. She was a mess. The best kind of mess.  
  
He doesn’t say any of it out loud. What good would it do? Let his mother think she was a good girl, let her cling to that if it keeps her from losing it completely.  
  
If he closes his eyes and lets himself pretend none of this is real, it’s wishful thinking. He opens them again a second later and— unfortunately not.  


Still real.   
  


**Author's Note:**

> find me [on tumblr](http://cupcakeb.tumblr.com/)


End file.
